Terms & Conditions (14 page)

How long will you live? And how much will it cost? How much is your life
worth
? Some say you can't put a price on life. Doug disagrees. Doug does it for a living. Doug's the guy who decides how much you should pay for insurance. If you're a thirty-year-old previous smoker with two kids, Doug knows to within a couple of years when you'll die. He also knows to within three or four possibilities what disease will kill you.

Doug has one job: he ensures people pay more money in than companies pay out. The margin between how much insurance companies shell out versus how much they take in is astronomical. You need only look at the major cities in the world to see that margin manifest itself into sparkly skyscrapers owned by insurance companies and banks. And the banks are only that big because the insurance companies keep their profits in them.

If there was ever a real medium, a modern soothsayer, then it's Doug. And he fits the part. Doug is in his late fifties but looks younger than me. According to office folklore he hasn't consumed a grain of sugar for thirty years and he eats only skinless, boneless chicken. He often closes his office door and blinds and is said to spend hours in deep meditation cracking the most complicated advanced maths known to man. I wondered if Doug has calculated his own death date, and is so far away from it that life still seems sweet. Is that why he's so serene? Or is it some sense of godliness that he gleans from his power to see into the future that credits him with this righteous glow?

Doug wears crisp white shirts, no tie, moleskin trousers, with odd shoes that are black and from a distance look like business shoes, but close up transpire to be trainers. No one has ever seen these business-trainers for sale anywhere and they started a whole new myth about the fact that they were specially crafted by men in India who make the perfect soles that are forever pushing essential life-giving, life-extending reflexology points whenever Doug walks. Rumours grow like mould in the Petri dish of office boredom. They're all probably rubbish, but there's something about Doug that validates the hearsay. That makes you think: maybe there's something in it. He doesn't radiate that dull anxiety that so many business people do; he floats around the office in his bouncy trainers, a few rubber inches off the stressful surface of it all.

His office is sparse. Not Philippe Starck sparse, not designer sparse, but sparse in an unused sort of way. White walls, no carpet; Doug got his office floor stripped back to wood. There are theories about this too: the desire to dispel microscopic spores roosting within. Odder still, odder than all the sparseness, is the fact that he has no computer. It makes it seem as though the office is not only deserted, but that the person deserting it stole everything on his way out.

Doug and my dad were associates and their relationship kept my father in business for many years. Although Doug was much younger than my father, they seemed to have a mutual admiration for one another and Doug always ensured that all legal contracts for his insurance company were handled by my father's firm.

When my father ran the company it was a fairly average, medium-sized business. It did terms and conditions and corporate contracts for lots of insurance companies and, yes, some of them were not great companies but overall it was fairly benign stuff. I'm not sure if that was due to some personal decision on my father's behalf or if it was just a slightly gentler era back then. All I know is that in a short time Oscar had brought his own distinctly horrible personality to bear. Suddenly we were working with bad insurance brokers, gambling companies and arms manufacturers.

And I remembered that once it was all out in the open, Oscar and I argued about the weapons manufacturer every single day.

I told him I was appalled and he would just say, ‘They'll need legal counsel, buddy; it's just the boring contracts, we're not selling missiles to anyone. Why worry?'

‘Because they're death factories,' I said.

‘Lighten up,' he said.

That was his advice –
Lighten up
.*

* Against his advice I found myself darkening down day by day.

TERMS & CONDITIONS OF DOUG

Effort kills.

I rarely saw Doug.

Few did. He was in his office before everyone and left after everyone. But one night I stepped into the lift and waited for the doors to close – so that I could have a good look at myself in the mirror – but between the closing doors a hand wedged in, the doors breathed open, and there was Doug.

He asked how I was. I said I was fine and was about to enquire how he was, but he looked so radiant that it seemed like a superfluous thing to ask, and Doug was one of those men you didn't want to irritate with obvious questions. Something about his stature – maybe it was just his reputation, the myths – something about him prevented you talking naturally to him. You wanted only to say deep and meaningful things to Doug.

Which made it all the funnier when Doug said, ‘Bet you were angry I barged in, Frank. Bet you were just about to give yourself a nice vanity shot with the mirror. In the lift, by yourself, no man or woman can resist it. Am I right?'

‘You got me,' I laughed.

‘Go ahead – look. We all spend our lives pretending we're not looking at things. Not looking at ourselves, not looking at beautiful women. Such an effort. And effort kills.'

As I always did with Doug, I wondered if this statement was coded advice. A suggestion by a man who all day quantifies death and therefore understood a little more about life. A man who'd conquered fundamental things I'd yet to grasp.

Effort kills
.*

* Make your life effortless and live for ever.

Doug said, ‘When lifts were first invented they made people feel sick, you know.'

Doug hadn't pushed the button yet. The lift wasn't moving. He said, ‘So Otis Lifts got engineers to make the ride smoother, faster. Didn't work. People still felt sick. So they hired a philosopher to crack the problem. Some Frenchman, lateral thinker. And he said: we love ourselves. Put mirrors in the lifts, we'll be distracted, and no one will feel sick.'

‘Is that true?'

‘Sounds true, doesn't it,' said Doug. ‘So go ahead, look at yourself.'

‘I'm good. I'll give myself a look in the rear-view mirror in the car.'

‘Not while you're driving, though,' warned Doug. ‘Three per cent of car accidents involving men are due to them looking at themselves in the mirror while driving. I estimate it's around 10 per cent for women. This is counterbalanced, however, when you consider that 30 per cent of men crash leering at women on the street. There's a whole formula I made in the sixties for miniskirts. The Minideath Formula. They killed a lot of men, miniskirts. Even a glance can kill. What can you do? We're all killing ourselves spying on one another.'

‘We're a bunch of vain perverts.'

Doug laughed and I made a note to laugh more. Maybe another secret to long life.*

* Laugh at life and live for ever.

When Doug realised we weren't moving, he hit the basement button.

‘Basement, right?' said Doug, and I nodded.

Then we stood, lost in that odd hush which lifts breed – suspended silence – as if the time is too slight to allow for a worthwhile conversation, so you wait it out, waste the moment, mutually agree to experience terse quiet rather than risk dull small talk. But in this instance I'm glad we didn't let the silence stretch unbearably all the way down to the basement.

‘How are things in the world of law, Frank?' Doug asked, snapping me out of my trance.

‘Not bad,' I said, watching the numbers fall – 31, 30, 29 . . .

‘Oscar still running the show?'

‘Yup. He's taking us in an interesting direction.'

‘I hear disapproval.'

‘It's a direction Dad would never have gone.'

28, 27, 26 . . .

I suddenly wanted to blurt out all my worries to Doug.

I wanted to tell him everything, to cry on his shoulder; he was a channel, a sort of conduit to happier times when my dad was alive and I'd come and play at the offices, and Doug would smile and ruffle my hair. Doug was as close to a friend as my father ever got.*

* Maybe as close to a friend as I ever got.

‘You're talking about the weapons contract,' said Doug.

‘You know?'

25, 24, 23 . . .

‘A dark decision,' said Doug. ‘I advised Oscar against it, but you can't tell your brother. There's statistical karma and what your brother's contemplating is statistically incalculable. I don't like incalculable things. Oscar's about to place a big minus sign next to his soul and he'll pay for it, somehow, somewhere down the line, it's unavoidable. You can't play with negative statistics and walk away unharmed. Mathematically impossible.'

It was the most meaningful thing anyone had said to me. I wanted the lift never to stop, to keep descending, to allow us to talk into the night as we dropped through the earth.

11, 10, 9 . . .

‘I completely agree, Doug. I mean, I really hate the idea of it but no one else seems to think it's a problem. It's like no one cares.' I stopped myself, as I could hear that I was close to crying.

Doug didn't say anything; he turned slowly and looked at me. I noticed the elevator music, a panpipe version of ‘The Girl from Ipanema'.

‘You need to make a choice, Frank. You're a nice guy but you need to decide. It's not up to anyone else.'

The hum of the lift, the panpipes, the dull beep of passing floors formed a hypnotic space: 8, 7, 6 . . .

‘It's so good to talk to you, Doug.'

He looked at me again, not a nice look but hard, as if calculating something.

5, 4, 3 . . .

He said, ‘Do you remember when you came to me when you were all of sixteen?'

The memory made me blush. I'd had an argument with Dad. Our first and only real fight.

Over dinner with Oscar, Malcolm, Mum and Dad, I declared that I was going to take biology, chemistry and maths for my A levels. It was my way of telling my father that I wasn't going to do law; that I was going to pursue medicine instead. The table went quiet. Oscar, who was already at law school, let out a dismissive snort.

We all waited as Dad mulled this over, before saying, ‘Frank, you're not going to do this. Medicine is a myth perpetuated by the middle classes; it's a horrible job with terrible hours, disgusting sick people and endless training. It doesn't even work. When GPs went on strike the death rate plummeted. You don't want to get involved in all that. Medicine's messy.'

Dad hated messy things, like organs or emotions or hysterical teenage sons. My mother, God bless her, tried to intervene. ‘Maybe you should listen to Frank, dear, maybe he would prefer to do medicine.'

Dad patted Mum's hand in a way that made me want to run him through with the carving knife, and he continued, ‘You want to be on the legal side of life, Frank, trust me. Your life begins with a birth certificate and ends with a death certificate, and in between all of that are a million documents, insurance policies, employment contracts, mortgages, prenups. Medicine tries and fails to tidy up life's mess after the fact; law ties it all tightly in place
before
the fact. And it's the men who write these documents that run the world.'

It was an old speech. I pretended to listen, then said, ‘I disagree, Dad.'

Everyone at the table held their breath. This was not how we spoke; nobody, not even Mum, could say ‘I disagree' to my dad.

‘Listen here, young man,' said Dad, but I made my fork clash against the plate and shouted, ‘Don't you dare call me young man, and stop telling me what to do!'

‘I don't want to argue with you,' said Dad.

‘Well, I want to fucking argue with you,' I shouted back.

Everyone stopped and, for a second, no one knew how to start again.

Then I heard Mum say, ‘Come on now, please, Frank, sit down, don't get upset, we can discuss this, your father is just . . .' As I stood up I heard Oscar sneer, ‘Prick,' as Malcolm muttered, ‘Fuck yeah, Frank!'

I stormed out. I found myself on the street with nowhere to go. For reasons I cannot really understand – even today – I went to Doug's house. Possibly because it was nearby, possibly because Doug was always honest with me. When I got to his door I was crying.

He poured me a whisky, which made me feel like a man, a person being taken seriously, and we spoke. I assumed Doug was on my side but, as the conversation wore on, it occurred to me that he too was telling me that law was my best option.

Doug said, ‘Your father is a highly respected man. You're a boy with an incredible intellect. You're brilliant. And law will allow your brilliance to be both tested and to shine.'

It was the start of people telling me I was brilliant. In my defence, it's hard not to agree with people who are telling you incredibly flattering things. I caved in, Doug drove me home, and eventually I took economics, history, English and, of course, I went to law school. I was ashamed. For a while after, whenever I saw Doug, I was embarrassed that he'd seen me upset, crying like a child. In the descending lift I looked down at the carpeted floor and said, ‘I made a fool of myself, sorry, I was young and stupid.'

‘Not at all,' said Doug. ‘In fact, I made a fool of
myself
. What you don't know is that before you arrived your father called me and told me to support him. I always felt bad about it. I should have supported you more. You never wanted to do law. You were sixteen, yes, but you knew
what you wanted, and we all talked you out of a dream. And talking a young man out of a dream – that's intolerable and for that I'm truly sorry.'

I heard the numbers in the lift running down, slowing, we were near the basement, and I was too flustered to answer properly, so I mumbled, ‘Don't be silly, Doug. I mean, I was a boy, I needed guidance, I'm sure you did the right thing.'